Primates are highly social animals with much to tell us about the evolution of social systems. Much of our knowledge of primate social behavior comes, however, from a limited set of species, chosen either because of their close relatedness to humans (e.g. chimpanzees) or because they are relatively easy to see in open habitats where they live (e.g. baboons and certain macaques). However, primates are fundamentally forest-dwelling animals, and knowledge about species living in forests is much more limited. Dr. Cords’ team examines the social and reproductive strategies of individual forest-dwelling blue monkeys in the context of their social groups, including patterns of social exchange, feeding behavior and reproduction. The team keeps up long-term individual-based data collection on basic life history events (births, deaths, immigrations and emigrations) that facilitates shorter-term aims.

Dr. Marina Cords, Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, began studying blue monkeys thirty-five years ago, when almost nothing was known about the social behavior of these primates. Today, her study population is the only one (for any guenon), and one of only a few primate populations worldwide, in which there is deep background knowledge of individually recognized animals that allows researchers to assess animal age and kinship, two central variables that explain social patterns.

The presence of Dr. Cords’ long-term project in the Kakamega Forest has also played a valuable role in forest conservation. Over the years, Dr. Cords has constructed three “conservation education resource centers” equipped with a library and educational materials for the Kakamega Environmental Education Program. She arranged visits by multiple volunteers to work with this registered community-based organization, which went on to attract international volunteers on its own. She continues to advise the officers on educational and policy matters. In 2009, Dr. Cords was invited to participate in the development of a participatory management plan, co-ordinated by the provincial forestry office as part of Kenya’s then new Forest Act, which mandates conservation action and community involvement. On a day to day basis, the research team alerts forest service officials to poaching and other illegal activities they discover, and sometimes even stops them outright.

Dr. Cords’ current research includes:

• Understanding the nature of social bonding, and whether participation in close and stable bonds enhances fitness (survival and reproduction). Such effects of friendship have been identified in other social animals, but the blue monkey team seems to be finding different patterns from others.
• Identifying the consequences, both behavioral and reproductive, of living in groups of different sizes. Although fundamental, this question is a new one for the team as they have only recently been able to address it, after a series of study group fissions (splits) created much smaller groups than they had observed before. “Working with natural populations, this is not a variable over which we have direct control!” says Dr. Cords.
• Studying the role of kinship in structuring behavioral interactions. Blue monkeys generally show nepotism in their social behavior but there are hints that their kin bias may be relatively weak.
• Dr. Cords’ team hopes to gain a better perspective of the importance of dominance rank in the lives of these animals. They have found very limited evidence that social rank affects an animal’s behavior and reproduction. What really matters is lifetime reproductive success, however, and so examining rank affects not only on reproduction but also survival is critical. This is a long-term undertaking in animals that can live into their thirties.
• The team is also looking into the way in which group-wide cooperation is structured. Blue monkey females defend territorial boundaries against their neighbors but it appears that even though the entire group benefits from securing access to a feeding area, they don’t all participate equally in the defense. Dr. Cords would like to understand how kinship structures cooperative exchange, as well as individual benefit (for example, in large groups, a female might be less likely to participate in territorial defense than in a small group, where their participation contributes relatively more). The researchers are studying how cooperation at the dyadic level (such as in grooming, possibly also feeding tolerance) relates to participation in collective territorial defense.